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For non-Portugese-speakers, the title of this darkly enigmatic film set in Sao Paulo, Brazil, demands explanation. The word “obra” can refer to a work of art, a good or bad deed, or, ever more significantly as in “en obra,” to a building under construction. All meanings relate to director-writer Gregorio Graziosi’s troubling story of a young architect (played by Irandir Santos) struggling to build a high-rise on an urban family lot.
The lot, originally the site of a building owned by his now-dying grandfather, contains a church with damaged murals depicting the twelve apostles, which the architect would like to preserve. It also contains, as workmen discover when digging, twelve (more…)

“Minsk, 2011: A Reply to Kathy Acker” is the provocative title of the multi-faceted and evocative performance from Belarus included in the 2013 Ringling International Arts Festival. Employing sex, dance, song and pantomime to create what is essentially a political protest against the repressive Belarus dictatorship of Alexander Lukashenko, the nine actors succeed in forcefully demonstrating why they left Minsk and have become political refugees.

The connection to the late American Jewish punk author Kathy Acker (1948-1997) and her New York City in 1979, one of her many provocative books, is made, perhaps, because Acker’s writings repeatedly portray and protest homophobia and sexual repression.

Sex here becomes a forceful and symbolic weapon. When one of the actresses appears nude, she is then painted by the others with what appears to be black ink, and then, wrapped in shroud-like strips of white paper. One does not have to be a journalist, surely, to interpret this as a symbol of the suppression of the freedom of the press.

All in all then, these exiles from Belarus have created an absorbing and forceful theatrical protest. Kudos go to the nine actors and also to director Vladimir Shcherban.

For not the first time, Shakespeare lovers, the Ringling International Arts Festival is offering a version of “Hamlet.”In 2011 it was the “Wooster Group Hamlet” from New York City.This year, the Leev Theatre Group founded in 2008 in Iran is performing “Hamlet, Prince of Grief.

This version consists of a single actor monologue presented in Farsi with English subtitles.It was written by Mohammad Charmshir a widely performed and translatedIranian professor-playwright, and directed by the award-winning Mohammad Aghebati, an Iranian who is now a student at the Yale School of Drama.

As the play begins, we find a casually dressed Hamlet (played by the talented Iranian actor-writer Afshin Hashemi) seated at a table facing the audience.He is a student, he tells us, looking forward to a day in the country following difficult exams.Soon however, he is informed––by cell phone—that his father is dead.

Then, digging into the open suitcase which seemed at first to contain only his picnic equipment, he removes small toy figures which come to represent the play’s characters.An elephant is his mother Queen Gertrude, and a wolf is his uncle Claudius, now the king. A Barbie-like doll in a white dress is Ophelia.

There is some diddling with the plot: it is the queen, not Claudius who kills Hamlet’s father by pouring poison in his ears.Still, Hamlet’s difficulty and irresolution concerning what to do about the murder remains.The real trouble here is that, after a mere 35 minutes, the play ends.The toys are put away again in the suitcase—leavingthe audience with a disappointing sense that the play has been trivialized, even caricatured.

The problem is not the use of the toys, a device that, if given more time, could have been innovative and enlarging.It is, perhaps, that the planners of the Ringling Festival seem to assume that young and innovative theatrical groups must, perforce, present well-known classics such as “Hamlet” in order to “connect.”

Truly through, it might be more enlightening and engaging if the organizers of the Ringling Festival instead alloweda group such as the Leev to present their own plays.The author of“Hamlet, Prince of Grief,” Mohammad Charmshir, has, according to the theatre program, had “about 55 plays” published.Next year, we might better abjure a truncated “Hamlet” in favor of a new, original, full length work.

How is a dead writer best remembered?
The Russian poet Josef Brodsky (1940-1996) is accorded a compelling and always respectful accolade in director Jan Andrew’s moving film screened at the Ringling International Arts Festival on October 11th. “Joseph Brodsky: In the Prison of the Latitudes” is an intensely political—rather than revealingly personal—view of the Leningrad-born writer who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1987.
Employing photographs of Leningrad, where the poet lived for (more…)

Can it be that even an acknowledged masterpiece such as “Hamlet” may be, well, a little bit old hat? Is there any reason that the play can’t—or shouldn’t—be juiced up?

Purists may object, but when The Wooster Group came down from New York City to offer five performances of “Hamlet” at the Asolo’s Cook Theatre as part of the Ringling International Arts Festival, (more…)

Meklit Hadero, whose pretty profile and flower-adorned Afro hairdo was featured on the cover of the program for the Ringling International Arts Festival, comes across as a perfect poster girl for multiculturalism. After all, Hadero, (more…)

“How can we make sense of so many voices speaking together?” was the question posed by Dr. Steven High, executive director of the Ringling Museum of Art, at the October 13th symposium at the Museum’s third annual international arts festival.